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CEO Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo ban on work at home means employees are being studied for value: Mallick

Yahoo Inc.’s decision to haul its telecommuting workers out of their home offices and back into the communal workplace is a shock to the system, as much a retro-move as the return to corsetry and conservatism.

It’s as if the modern workplace sent a boomerang of employees outside in the ’90s and it came whanging back in 2013.

Yahoo Inc. decided it preferred to have its workers in the office, where output is more 'measurable.' (Dreamstime)

But Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has a point, although it’s a wobbly conditional one.

If work requires collaboration, it’s best done in the office, although my understanding was that conference calls and emails were supposed to have done the trick. Clearly they didn’t. Ah, the unreachability of the untethered employee.

I dine at home with my iPad beside my plate, I scrabble desperately in my purse for my iPhone, I vacation with my laptop. If Lisbon were to suffer another earthquake — the last big one was in 1755 — I’d be able to get into work mode and race outside for human interest quotes. I hate vacations.

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But we are people for whom the phrases “quality of life” and “work-life balance” mean nothing. Other people, especially those with young children, don’t feel this way. Yahoo isn’t going to penalize valued employees with children, as long as they have a measurable output.

“As long as they have a measurable output.” That simple phrase has added to my word total, which an employer can easily count. The problem, of course, is that even a superficially impressive yearly word count may include dull, thudding un-monetizable words, in which case it would be wise of me to appear at 9, chat loudly in hallways and write long pointless unasked-for memos.

Eighty per cent of success, after all, is just showing up.

Yet the industrial tide says otherwise. Universities are going online, a destructive move that is nevertheless unstoppable because it cuts the teaching payroll. It may be fine to take online courses in first-year subjects that involve memorized facts and calculations. It’s less fine in later years. What troubles me is that students may end up with a degree on the cheap while never having met a smart person, a professor who talks with facility, who teaches like a dream.

I have met people with degrees who have never read a book. It can be done if you apply yourself. Perhaps it’s no worse to have earned a degree in your basement. But you won’t get hired at Yahoo, I take it.

And here’s where it gets complicated. Working from home became attractive in North America partly because transit was so awful. The drive took hours, the bus was unspeakable and the subway was packed. It created a biting demand for improvements in public transit. So the new Yahoo rules should be for the common good.

Thus I am haunted by a piece by Rebecca Solnit in the London Review of Books about the Google bus, a gleaming white thing that makes it possible for highly paid Silicon Valley workers to live in San Francisco, thus raising housing prices beyond the reach of normal people. They can cut their commute, Solnit wrote, from 4.5 hours to 3.5.

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Normally it would be a fine thing to see people taking public transit to work because their fares assist the public good. But the Google bus is a grotesque example of what economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1958 called “private affluence and public squalor.”

Imagine waiting for a ratty orange public bus, dirty and infrequent, to take you to your precarious ill-paid job. Imagine watching the Google bus shun you as it shows up for the securely employed with gyms at work, and nap rooms, and grassy knolls. Imagine being unable to afford rent on an apartment because a giant and distant corporation calls its employees to distant work while still isolating them from the community.

This is income inequality in its most painful tactile form.

Perhaps I am being paranoid on Yahoo employees’ behalf but I suspect Yahoo is calling them in to inspect them. I see layoffs ahead, Yahoos. Flexible work was a way to attract valuable employees without paying them more, but the recession has been here for a long time and will remain even longer.

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